Promises made and not kept are bad for business. It makes people question the integrity of the company.

I work as an application architect for a government agency. Some of our developers have inquired about purchasing RedGate tools. That will definitely not be happening now.

To anyone else who thinks that promises should mean something:

Vote with your wallets, by all appearances, that is the only language that RedGate understands.

Was the word 'promise' ever used in any of their communication or was it all implied by a community who made such an assumption because they said they would continue to provide a 'free' version of Reflector?

I've already voted with my wallet and ordered their .NET Bundle. Reflector Pro was included, but their ANTS Profiling tools were my main target and have really helped me find some real hot-spots within hours of owning the product.

I would rather shell out the $35 to keep Reflector alive than to see it no longer developed and kept up with language changes only to fall by the wayside.

BTW, application architects are not the individuals that have the need to acquire such tools. It is usually the lowly maintenance coders who need all of the tools they can get to find all of the flaws in the original architecture.

JDelekto wrote:Was the word 'promise' ever used in any of their communication or was it all implied by a community who made such an assumption because they said they would continue to provide a 'free' version of Reflector?

So you're arguing that since they never explicitly use the word "promise" it's all ok? That just turns it into a lie to the community, I'm failing to see how that's any better.

There's absolutely nothing stopping them from taking the time-bomb out of v6 and keeping their promise, it would likely take the investment of commenting out a few lines of code. Yet no one from Red Gate will respond here saying why that isn't an option, funny how that works. This isn't a choice they're giving people, it's a lack of options. If v7 was a choice to upgrade to that'd be one thing, and I'd certainly buy it if they added the features they're touting. As it stands I will avoid Red Gate products as much as possible, and encourage others to do the same.

Let's be clear on something, .Net Reflector was free for 8 years before Red Gate got a hold of it. Yes there has always been a time-bomb, but why was it there? It was so that Lutz Roeder didn't have to support many versions at once, not used as a ransom device to extract money from as many as possible whenever Red Gate chose to.[/b]

JDelekto wrote:Was the word 'promise' ever used in any of their communication or was it all implied by a community who made such an assumption because they said they would continue to provide a 'free' version of Reflector?

So you're arguing that since they never explicitly use the word "promise" it's all ok? That just turns it into a lie to the community, I'm failing to see how that's any better.

I believe they did not lie and had intented to whole-heartedly continue to offer a free product to the community. However, the product did not "pay for itself" as they had expected and for them to support it, it would cost money.

There was no lie to the community and they have been pretty up front about their new intentions.

Perhaps they will release a free version of 6 which doesn't have the forced upgrade; however, I wouldn't expect any kind of technical support or any future support for changes in the language it attempts to decompile.

NickCraver wrote:Let's be clear on something, .Net Reflector was free for 8 years before Red Gate got a hold of it. Yes there has always been a time-bomb, but why was it there? It was so that Lutz Roeder didn't have to support many versions at once, not used as a ransom device to extract money from as many as possible whenever Red Gate chose to.[/b]

It is funny that you say that, because I had noted earlier that the forced upgrades were to avoid continual support requests for older versions of the product.

I really hope it is still the case and that with the last version of Reflector there is no 'force' of upgrading, but a simple unlock and perhaps even a short-term discount. (Which is probably covered by the 50 licenses Red Gate donated.)

I don't think that Red Gate chose this as a "ransom" device to force to people to pay for an upgrade; but I could be wrong. Perhaps their announcement was to notify others that they would begin charging for the product and the product did not yet force an upgrade which asked them to pay.

JDelekto wrote:Perhaps their announcement was to notify others that they would begin charging for the product and the product did not yet force an upgrade which asked them to pay.

Or perhaps it was a big i'm-sorry-my-a** to the community for not being able keep the Reflector as a free tool widely (globally) used in the .Net community. You do understand that Reflector is like the bread and butter to every .Net developer.

JDelekto wrote:I believe they did not lie and had intented to whole-heartedly continue to offer a free product to the community. However, the product did not "pay for itself" as they had expected and for them to support it, it would cost money.

There was no lie to the community and they have been pretty up front about their new intentions.

I believe this as well.

I also believe that RedGate should have probably handled this transition to a paid model differently and (perhaps paradoxically) that the vociferous complaints are out of proportion to the amount of damage.

Of course I'd prefer that a final, non-timebombed free release be made. And I'm not particularly happy that if I want to continue using Reflector, I'll have to pay. On the other hand, $35 for an "essential tool" isn't too much.

However, most people seem to be indicate that it's the broken promise or breach of trust that's causing the venom in the negative feedback. Sure it's not great hearing that something you thought was promised as free forever won't turn out to be. But on the scale of broken promises (and there is a scale - one broken promise isn't necessarily as bad as another), I think that being stood up for a date would rate more painful than no longer being able to use this tool for free.

mb wrote:... it's the broken promise or breach of trust that's causing the venom in the negative feedback.

I can't speak for everyone, but my "venom" is simply due to the time-bombing of v6.

If you provide a tool, free or otherwise, and then decide to change what you charge for the next version, that's fine. But to try to retroactively apply the new charge to everyone who downloaded the previous version is totally unacceptable.

What makes matters worse is the total contempt with which RedGate employees are treating this negative feedback. So far, their only responses to complains about the v6 time-bomb have been "v7 won't have a time-bomb" and "Lutz added the time-bomb so don't blame us". This fundamental inability to understand the nature of the complains just confirms that RedGate doesn't care about their users.

As to what RedGate "promised." Read their own words and decide for yourself what this means to you.

"Under an agreement announced on Wednesday 20th August , Red Gate will be responsible for the future development of .NET Reflector, the popular tool authored by Lutz Roeder. Red Gate will continue to offer the tool for free to the community."

AND

"We accept the fact that there will be scepticism, but we can point to a good track record of support for the community."

AND (IN BOLD)
"Red Gate will continue to offer the tool for free to the community."

I think they will be paying the price for a while on this move. I didn't use the reflector tool, but I use quite a bit of free community tools across the industry for pro bono work. I heard this news from a colleague who is pissed, because he used it a ton. Being a community advocate, I wanted to pass this info on here to disgruntled customers. I saw this on twitter the other day: www.keepdecompilingfree.com. Not sure what will come of it, but between that and what JetBrains plans to offer, there should be some new alternatives popping up. Competitors definitely use this type of thing to scoop up lost marketshare.